NYC Dads and Stay At Home Dads Group: Babies and Baseball

Editor?s Note: In celebration of our group?s budding relationship with the New York Mets, we?d like to present this piece by NYC Dads Group member Jason Duncan about taking his baby (ahem, toddler) to Citi Field. KMcK.

A fellow stay-at-home dad/native of Cincinnati and I recently took our little girls into what we thought would be hostile territory to a watch a Reds/Mets game at New York?s Citi Field. It probably didn?t help our cause much with my wearing a Yankees cap.

However, everybody was very polite and nobody said anything. At least not to our faces.

Given that it was around naptime for the Little One when we got off the subway in Queens, I tried to stroller her into a nap. After 10 minutes, I succeeded. Since we could use the strollers in Citi Field (as opposed to having to check them at guest relations like you do at Yankee Stadium), my friend and I decided to push her right inside.

I pulled my diaper bag out of the bottom of the stroller in advance of the gate and unzipped it so the security personnel could inspect the innards to ensure that I wasn?t toting in C4 with my Burt?s Bees Diaper Ointment. With half a glance at the bag, the security guy then asked me to take my baby out of the stroller, please.

A sleeping baby (ahem, toddler).

Now, as everybody knows, you are asking for a huge world of hurt if you rouse a sleeping child. But what was I to do? My friend was already inside and to turn around at the security checkpoint to hang out in the parking lot until she woke up 35 minutes later likely would have only brought suspicion down on my head, which might have resulted in my not being allowed into the game at all, and then I would have come to Queens for no reason, and if you ever have to go to Queens, you really ought to have a reason for doing it.

So I pulled her out. She immediately woke up. Satisfied that there wasn?t a grenade strapped to the ass of my baby (ahem, toddler), the guard waved us through.

This is going to be a disaster, I thought. She was groggy, blurry eyed and cranky. She immediately started with her patented ?Go! Go!? that she uses when she doesn?t want to be someplace, and I knew I?d made a terrible mistake. I hated that security guard.

We settled into our seats, which were excellent, by the way: three rows back from the left field wall? where home run balls are a real concern when you?ve got a baby ? toddler ? on your lap. The seats, which had they been in Yankee Stadium would have gone for something like $350, cost only $19 on StubHub. Little One kept up with her ?Go! Go!? but then they started to turn into ?Yay! Yay!? and clapped her hands with everybody else.

She actually stayed in her seat and let me put on her hat (pink, Yankees ? sorry) and she let me put on her sunglasses (pink), apply sun block,and change her out of her pants and into her (pink) shorts when it got hot. She even tracked the home run ball that Cincinnati?s Joey Votto hit into the seats about fifteen feet from us (in the ESPN SportsCenter highlight of Votto?s blast later that night, she?s appeared as the light pink blur that doesn?t move while everybody else around her stands up and leans left).

She also learned from dear old dad that you never throw the ball back, you never toss the ball back on the field, no matter how many home fans around you are clamoring for you to do so because?

1. You might hit and injure a player who isn?t expecting a baseball to come from behind him, and
2. This will very likely never happen to you ever again.

You always keep the ball. No matter what. (The bozo kid who caught the ball in the next section over tossed it back, much to the delight of the 30,000 Mets fans on hand.)

She was great. In fact, both babies (toddlers, dammit!) were great. Much better than ever could have been hoped for. They even let us stay through the entire game (Reds won 7-4). Who could ask for more than that? A perfect game on a perfect day with the perfect effing offspring? Who could want more than that?

(Well, if Joey Votto had smacked that ball about fourteen or fifteen feet farther to the left and about three rows up, that would?ve been alright, too.)

+ + +

Jason Duncan (holding Little One in the photo above) is a full-time stay-at-home-dad, writer, blogger, fly fisher and terrier owner. His twice-weekly humor blog can be found at: www.myeffingoffspring.blogspot.com. In February, he boldly (yet incorrectly) predicted TIME magazine?s person of the year for our blog.

Source: http://www.nycdadsgroup.com/2013/06/babies-and-baseball.html

Tony Awards